By Joshua Rothman
This method is quite common in science fiction. It’s not the one employed by William Gibson, the writer who, for four decades, has imagined the near future more convincingly than anyone else. Gibson doesn’t have a name for his method; he knows only that it isn’t about prediction. It proceeds, instead, from a deep engagement with the present. When Gibson was starting to write, in the late nineteen-seventies, he watched kids playing games in video arcades and noticed how they ducked and twisted, as though they were on the other side of the screen. The Sony Walkman had just been introduced, so he bought one; he lived in Vancouver, and when he explored the city at night, listening to Joy Division, he felt as though the music were being transmitted directly into his brain, where it could merge with his perceptions of skyscrapers and slums. His wife, Deborah, was a graduate student in linguistics who taught E.S.L. He listened to her young Japanese students talk about Vancouver as though it were a backwater; Tokyo must really be something, he thought. He remembered a weeping ambulance driver in a bar, saying, “She flatlined.” On a legal pad, Gibson tried inventing words to describe the space behind the screen; he crossed out “infospace” and “dataspace” before coming up with “cyberspace.” He didn’t know what it might be, but it sounded cool, like something a person might explore even though it was dangerous.
Gibson first used the word “cyberspace” in 1981, in a short story called “Burning Chrome.” He worked out the idea more fully in his first novel, “Neuromancer,” published in 1984, when he was thirty-six. Set in the mid-twenty-first century, “Neuromancer” follows a heist that unfolds partly in physical space and partly in “the matrix”—an online realm. “The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,” the novel explains, “in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.” By “jacking in” to the matrix, a “console cowboy” can use his “deck” to enter a new world:
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation. . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
Gibson was far from the first sci-fi writer to explore computers and their consequences; a movement, soon to be known as cyberpunk, was already under way. But “Neuromancer” changed science fiction by imagining a computer-saturated world that felt materially and aesthetically real. Gibson’s hardboiled prose was fanatically attentive to design and texture. A hacker’s loft contains a Braun coffeemaker, an Ono-Sendai cyberspace deck, and “the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads.” A spaceship is “walled in imitation ebony veneer and floored with gray tiles”—a Mercedes crossed with a “rich man’s private spa.” Gibson’s future seemed already to have aged: the counterfeit young are “marked by a certain telltale corrugation at the knuckles, something the surgeons were unable to erase.” The science-fiction writer Samuel R. Delany marvelled at the novel’s “wonderful, almost hypnotic, surface hardness.” Describing a hacker about to deploy a virus, Gibson invented his own language, toughened with use: “He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in.”
Most science fiction takes place in a world in which “the future” has definitively arrived; the locomotive filmed by the Lumière brothers has finally burst through the screen. But in “Neuromancer” there was only a continuous arrival—an ongoing, alarming present. “Things aren’t different. Things are things,” an A.I. reports, after achieving a new level of consciousness. “You can’t let the little pricks generation-gap you,” one protagonist tells another, after an unnerving encounter with a teen-ager. In its uncertain sense of temporality—are we living in the future, or not?—“Neuromancer” was science fiction for the modern age. The novel’s influence has increased with time, establishing Gibson as an authority on the world to come.
The ten novels that Gibson has written since have slid steadily closer to the present. In the nineties, he wrote a trilogy set in the two-thousands. The novels he published in 2003, 2007, and 2010 were set in the year before their publication. (Only the inevitable delays of the publishing process prevented them from taking place in the years when they were written.) Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because it’s familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibson’s strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. “The future is already here,” he has said. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.”
The further Gibson developed his present-tense sci-fi, the more mysterious and resonant his novels became. They seemed to reveal a world within the world: the real present. The approach was risky; it put him at the mercy of events. In 2001, Gibson rushed to incorporate the September 11th attacks into his half-completed eighth novel, “Pattern Recognition,” a story about globalization, filmmaking, Internet forums, brand strategy, and informational deluge. Terrorism turned out to fit neatly within this framework; “Pattern Recognition” is often described as the first post-9/11 novel. The risks could pay off.
Two years ago, in December of 2017, I e-mailed Gibson to ask if he’d consent to being profiled, since his new novel was to be published that spring. He replied, explaining that the election of Donald Trump had forced him to delay the book. “I’ve had to get an extension,” he wrote. Extrapolating from current events, he had already written into his novel “a nuclear crisis involving Syria, Russia, nato, and Turkey”:
But then Trump started fucking with N Korea, here, so how scary can my scenario be? He keeps topping me, but I think I can handle it in rewrite. And if there’s a nuclear war, at least I won’t have to turn in the manuscript! . . .
Crazy times,
Bill
In March, 2018, I e-mailed Gibson again, but he had delayed the book a second time. “Cambridge Analytica now requires a huge rethink, major revisions,” he wrote. “This is very comical in a way, but still a huge problem.”
Earlier this year, we finally met, in Vancouver, to talk about the novel, “Agency,” which comes out next month. Gibson is now seventy-one. Bald and skinny, six feet five but for a slight stoop, he dresses almost exclusively in a mixture of futuristic techwear and mid-twentieth-century American clothing painstakingly reproduced by companies in Japan. It was late on a gray afternoon; we sat at the bar of a cozy bistro—warm wood, zinc bar, brass fixtures—while Gibson, in his slow, quiet, wowed-out, distantly Southern drawl, described the work of keeping up with the present.
“With each set of three books, I’ve commenced with a sort of deep reading of the fuckedness quotient of the day,” he explained. “I then have to adjust my fiction in relation to how fucked and how far out the present actually is.” He squinted through his glasses at the ceiling. “It isn’t an intellectual process, and it’s not prescient—it’s about what I can bring myself to believe.”
“Agency” is a sequel to Gibson’s previous novel, “The Peripheral,” from 2014, which is currently being adapted into a television show for Amazon, executive-produced by the creators of “Westworld.” In writing “The Peripheral,” he’d been able to bring himself to believe in the reality of an ongoing slow-motion apocalypse called “the jackpot.” A character describes the jackpot as “multicausal”—“more a climate than an event.” The world eases into it gradually, as all the bad things we worry about—rising oceans, crop failures, drug-resistant diseases, resource wars, and so on—happen, here and there, to varying degrees, over the better part of the twenty-first century, adding up to “androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit” that eventually kills eighty per cent of the human race. It’s a Gibsonian apocalypse: the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed. One character reacts to the jackpot equivocally: “Either depressing and scared the fuck out of me or sort of how I’d always figured things are?”
“I had real trouble coming to that,” Gibson said. “I couldn’t really think about it. I just had to get to the point where I could write it really quickly. Afterward, I looked at it and was just . . . It was the first time I’d admitted it to myself.”
After “The Peripheral,” he wasn’t expecting to have to revise the world’s F.Q. “Then I saw Trump coming down that escalator to announce his candidacy,” he said. “All of my scenario modules went ‘beep-beep-beep—super-fucked, super-fucked,’ like that. I told myself, Nah, it can’t happen. But then, when Britain voted yes on the Brexit referendum, I thought, Holy shit—if that could happen in the U.K., the U.S. could elect Trump. Then it happened, and I was basically paralyzed in the composition of the book. I wouldn’t call it writer’s block—that’s, like, a naturally occurring thing. This was something else.”
Gibson has a bemused, gentle, curious vibe. He is not a dystopian writer; he aims to see change in a flat, even light. “Every so often—and I bet a lot of people do this but don’t mention it—I have an experience unique in my life, of going, ‘This is so bad—could this possibly be real?’ ” he said, laughing. “Because it really looks very dire. If we were merely looking at the possible collapse of democracy in the United States of America—that’s pretty fucked. But if we’re looking at the collapse of democracy in the United States of America within the context of our failure to do anything that means shit about global warming over the next decade . . . I don’t know.” Perched, eagle-like, on his barstool, he swept his hand across the bar. “I’m, like, off the edge of the table.”
Photographs of Gibson have tended to find him in dark rooms, surrounded by wires and gizmos—a seer in his cyber cave. In fact, he has spent his writing life in a series of increasingly pretty houses on the arboreal streets of suburban Vancouver. The rambling, sunlit home where he and Deborah live now, in the city’s Shaughnessy neighborhood, dates from the early twentieth century; its many windows open onto radiant greenery. His quarter million Twitter followers are accustomed to photographs of Biggles, the couple’s extraordinarily large cat, lounging in the library, where Gibson does most of his writing. A photograph on the living-room mantelpiece shows the Gibsons’ son, Graeme, in aviators and a military jacket; nearby, a drawing of their daughter, Claire, hangs on the wall. Wandering around the first floor, I could find only one futuristic object: a small glass-and-aluminum cylinder, lit from within by warm L.E.D.s. This abstract oil lamp turned out to be a wireless speaker, given to Gibson by Jun Rekimoto, Sony’s version of Jony Ive.
Gibson had a distinctly American upbringing. Born in 1948, he told me that his earliest memories are of a farmhouse in Tennessee. The family lived there while his construction-manager father, William Ford Gibson, Jr.—Gibson is William Ford Gibson III—helped to oversee the building of workers’ housing at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Later, they occupied the red-brick model house of a Levittown-style suburban development in North Carolina. “And then we moved to a place near Virginia Beach, and while we lived there my father died,” Gibson said. “On a business trip, from a choking incident, pre-Heimlich maneuver. Like, if someone had known to squeeze him the right way, he might have survived.” He paused. “I think I was seven.”
Gibson and his mother, Otey, retreated to Wytheville, Virginia, the small Appalachian town where his parents had grown up, settling in a house that had been in his mother’s family for generations. “Before, I was watching TV in a suburb,” Gibson said. “I could see out the window that it was the modern world. And then I went to this place which, from many angles, looked like the early nineteen-hundreds.” In Wytheville, people reminisced about the days before recorded music; men plowed fields with mules. The mid-twentieth century leaked in, like light through the blinds. “I’m convinced that it was this experience of feeling abruptly exiled, to what seemed like the past, that began my relationship with science fiction,” Gibson has written.
Fatherless and quiet, Gibson was often alone. One day, he crawled through the window of an abandoned house and found a calendar from the Second World War. Each month had a picture of a different fighter plane—a sleek machine, yellowed by time. Meanwhile, from the wire rack at the Greyhound bus station, he bought science-fiction novels by H. G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and others. He noticed that their stories also supposed the existence of histories—real ones that were being reconsidered (the myths of empire and the American West), or prospective ones that seemed unlikely to come true (world government, the brotherhood of man). In Wytheville, people owned books like “The Lost Cause,” an encyclopedic account of the Civil War, published in 1866, which depicted slavery as benign. “I became someone who disassembles the past in which I find myself, in order to orient myself, or perhaps in order to relieve anxiety,” Gibson told me.
His mother was literary and progressive; she helped establish a library in Wytheville. But she grew worried as Gibson developed what he’s called a “Lovecraftian persona”—“introverted, hyper-bookish.” With his consent, she enrolled him in an all-boys boarding school in Arizona. Gibson, “extracted grub-like and blinking” from his bedroom, arrived when he was fifteen, got a girlfriend, and read the Beats. In the fall of his sophomore year, when he was seventeen, his mother died.
“Probably a stroke,” he said. “I’m not sure. She fell down dead walking somewhere—in those days, if an older person died, no one did an autopsy.” On the flight home, Gibson struggled to think about what had happened. As a child, after his father’s death, he had feared—irrationally, he thought—that his mother might die, too. Now she had. Years later, he would come to see himself as “doubly traumatized.” In the moment, he took refuge in an odd thought: at least she’d be spared the discomfort of watching him try to become an artist.
His mother’s estate provided him with a vanishingly small stipend. Instead of finishing high school, he took a bus to Toronto; he slept outdoors for a night and then found a job at a head shop, where he could sleep on the floor. Gibson is reluctant to talk much about those years—“I wasn’t a tightly wrapped package at that time,” he has said—but a 1967 CBC documentary features him, introduced as “Bill, a real hippie,” strolling through the city’s version of Haight-Ashbury. (He was paid five hundred dollars to serve as a quasi-anthropological tour guide: “The hippie society centers largely around this curious word ‘love,’ ” he explains in the program.) In his early twenties, in Washington, D.C., he earned his high-school diploma. He kept the Vietnam draft board apprised of his whereabouts but was never called up. Instead, he perused the ruins of the sixties, reading Pynchon and Borges, going to punk shows. Back in Toronto, he enrolled in art school and met Deborah, a former fashion model; they moved to Vancouver, her home town. For a while, he made ends meet as a vintage picker, buying undervalued objects—antique toys, Art Deco lamps, chrome ashtrays—from thrift shops and reselling them to dealers. Writing of the future in his third novel, “Mona Lisa Overdrive” (1988), he might have been describing this period: “The world hadn’t ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.”
Some speculative writers are architects: they build orderly worlds. But Gibson has a collagist’s mind. He has depicted himself as “burrowing from surface to previously unconnected surface.” His language connects contemporary jargon, with its tactical-technological inflections, to modern states of anxiety and desire. (His chapter titles include “Death Cookie,” “Ordinary Sad-Ass Humanness,” “Tango Hotel Soldier Shit.”) The novels register the virtual world’s micro-expressions—the way, when we’re still half asleep, the first Web site of the day opens as “familiar as a friend’s living room”—and attend to the built environments we take for granted, made from Styrofoam, cardboard, glass, silicon, wood, paper, leather, stone, rubber, and plastic, each subtype of material possessing its own distinctive look, feel, smell, weight, and history. In “Pattern Recognition,” an American marvels at the collage that is England:
Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance.
The difference, she thinks, has to do with Britain’s past as an industrial nation: “They made all their own stuff. . . . All their bits and pieces were different.” Only an outsider would notice the meaning in the bits.
In his late twenties, Gibson earned an English degree at the University of British Columbia. He took a class taught by the feminist sci-fi pioneer Susan Wood; she suggested that, instead of writing an analytical paper, he might turn in a story of his own. (At her urging, he sold the story, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” to a small magazine.) He began writing science fiction in earnest only when Graeme was on the way, and it seemed to him that his career had to start, or else. Deborah was in grad school, so he took care of the baby, writing “Neuromancer” while Graeme napped. He learned to work iteratively. He still rereads his manuscripts from the beginning each day—an increasing burden, as each book goes on—stripping away what’s superfluous and squirrelling new ideas into the gaps. (Having shown a technology used properly in one scene, he might show someone misusing it in another.) His plots are Tetris-like, their components snapping together at the last possible moment until the space of the novel is filled.
Often, at the center of the story, there’s a Gibson-like figure—an orphaned collagist of actual or digital bits. In “Count Zero,” the sequel to “Neuromancer,” an out-of-work curator is hired to track down an anonymous artist who is creating a series of boxes in the style of Joseph Cornell. She discovers that the artist is an artificially intelligent computer built by an unimaginably rich family. The family’s multinational mega-corporation has collapsed, and its space-based villa has fallen into disrepair. The A.I. has chopped the house into parts, and constructs the boxes by pulling fragments—“a yellowing kid glove”; “rectangular segments of perf board”; “an ornate silver spoon, sawn precisely in half, from end to end”—out of the floating cloud that the family’s life has become.
The romance of the abandoned child, of the orphan on the edge of everything, can give Gibson’s novels a sad sweetness. But his collages contain ugly materials, too. In his library, Gibson unfolded himself from his chair, retrieving a copy of “The Lost Cause,” which he had salvaged from Wytheville.
“In our house, there were these objects that no one ever said anything to me about,” he said. “I just found them myself, and reverse-engineered what they meant. These were being sold from the very beginning of Reconstruction, and within them—actually, there’s another one. . . .” He bent low, and picked up a smaller volume, blowing dust from its binding.
“This is the most evil object in the house,” he said. “It’s just, like, unspeakable!” He handed it to me. The book was “The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin Before the War,” by James Battle Avirett.
“Check out the inscription,” he said. It was dedicated to “the old planter and his wife—the only real slaves on the old plantation.”
Gibson settled on a hard-backed chair, adjusting the cuffs of his perfectly reproduced mid-century chambray workshirt. “It’s just the foulest revisionist text,” he said. “It was given to my grandmother when, I think, she was sixteen years old, signed by the author. She took me aside, on one or two ritual occasions, to try to indoctrinate me into the crucial, central significance of the ‘War of the Northern Invasion.’ ” He grimaced. “This is why the South is still so fucked up—because this stuff never quit. It never quit! It’s the formation . . .” He trailed off.
“Of our past?” I asked.
“Of our present,” he corrected me.
Gibson was in the process of sorting through his basement archive, which he planned to donate to U.B.C. Biggles accompanied us down the stairs; beneath a set of head-height windows, an old desk and table were covered with neatly piled manuscripts, some typewritten, others dot-matrix. Gibson wanted to show me the manual typewriter on which he’d composed “Neuromancer”: a 1927 Hermes 2000 that had belonged to Deborah’s stepgrandfather. While he rummaged, I inspected the screenplay for “Alien 3,” which he had written in the late eighties, during a contract-screenwriting phase. (In the end, an entirely different story was used.) A paperweight on top of it turned out to be a claw—a memento from the film. Biggles meowed, twining around my legs.
“Can’t find it!” Gibson said from behind a pinball machine based on the 1995 film “Johnny Mnemonic,” starring Keanu Reeves. (The movie had been adapted from his 1981 short story of the same name, about a courier who carries stolen corporate data on a chip in his head.) “I’ll have to text Claire.”
Near a rack of compact disks—Drive-By Truckers; Lucinda Williams; Dock Boggs; multiple bootlegs of live performances by the goth band Sisters of Mercy—a legal pad was covered in interlinked bubbles charting the plot of Gibson’s 1996 novel, “Idoru.” (A song called “Idoru” is featured on the forthcoming album by the future-pop musician Grimes.) One bubble read, “McGuffin in bag.” An orange notebook, filled with intricate time lines for “The Peripheral,” was decorated with a sticker bearing the logo of the niche techwear brand Outlier—a black swan.
“Ah,” Gibson said tenderly. He leaned over to open a green wooden cabinet, containing dozens of mementos: a marmoset skull, a smooth rock, a teacup from Japan. Gingerly, from behind the skull, he removed a small metal ray gun. “This gun,” he said. “I had one of these—the Hubley Atomic Disintegrator—as a kid. It’s a cap gun absolutely redolent of sci-fi romanticism!” He’d lost his own, and, in middle age, obtained this one on eBay.
“And these guys were very common,” he went on, taking down a small plastic spaceman: red, wearing an elaborately earmuffed helmet with an antenna on top. “These spacemen were dime-store toys at a time—which I can actually remember!—when cheap plastics were still weirdly novel. Like Gore-Tex or something. You’d ask, ‘What is it made of?’ ” He looked wistful, then thoughtful. “I’ve decided that one of the most significant things I ever saw in my life was the arrival of completely ubiquitous injection-molded plastics. I was certainly aware of them as the onset of something new. They cost practically nothing. But no one had any idea what a disaster we were all witnessing. Now the oceans are full of it.” He handed the spaceman to me. I hefted it, weightless, in my palm—an antique bit of misread future.
Gibson finished “Count Zero” and “Mona Lisa Overdrive,” the sequels to “Neuromancer,” in the late eighties. In the nineties, he achieved maximum fame for a sci-fi writer. It was a time when virtual reality promised to make cyberspace, as he’d described it in “Neuromancer,” real, and he and Deborah were invited to lavish V.R. conferences around the world. He collaborated with sculptors, dance troupes, and performance artists, and co-wrote, with Bruce Sterling, “The Difference Engine,” a novel that popularized the “steampunk” aesthetic. Movies borrowed liberally from his fiction. In 1999, four years after “Johnny Mnemonic,” “The Matrix,” also starring Reeves, remixed “Neuromancer” to superior effect.
Droll, chilled out, and scarily articulate, Gibson talked about the future on television. (“It doesn’t matter how fast your modem is if you’re being shelled by ethnic separatists,” he told the BBC.) He appeared on the cover of Wired, did some corporate consulting, and met David Bowie and Debbie Harry. For a time, U2, which had based its album “Zooropa” in part on Gibson’s work, planned to scroll the entirety of “Neuromancer” on a screen above the stage during its Zoo TV tour. The plan never came to fruition, but Gibson got to know the band; the Edge showed him how to telnet. During this period, Gibson was often credited with having “predicted” the Internet. He pointed out that his noir vision of online life had little in common with the early Web. Still, he had captured a feeling—a sense of post-everything information-driven transformation—that, by the nineties, seemed to be everywhere.
As the Internet became more accessible, Gibson discovered that he wasn’t terribly interested in spending time online himself. He was fascinated, though, by the people who did. They seemed to grow hungrier for the Web the more of it they consumed. It wasn’t just the Internet; his friends seemed to be paying more attention to media in general. When new television shows premièred, they actually cared. One of them showed him an episode of “Cops,” the pioneering reality series in which camera crews sprinted alongside police officers as they apprehended suspects. Policing, as performance, could be monetized. He could feel the world’s F.Q. drifting upward.
Instead of fantasizing about virtual worlds, Gibson inspected the real one. Storefronts in some Vancouver neighborhoods were strangely empty—the drawback before the tsunami of global capital, as though the city itself anticipated the future. “Have you been to Vancouver’s downtown east side?” he asked me. “It’s one of the poorest per-capita postal codes in the entire country, and it is absolutely brutal—well, brutal, Canadian style. Addiction, prostitution, street crime . . .” There were, he thought, more “interstitial spaces”—places that had fallen through widening civic and economic cracks. In Los Angeles, a friend drove him down a desolate street to an abandoned-looking building—Dennis Hopper’s house, she said, with art worth millions hidden behind its walls. Gibson thought he detected an uptick in the number of private security guards. He registered the increased presence of bike messengers—a new punk-athlete precariat—and began reading their zines.
If Gibson’s eighties novels imagined a fluid, hallucinatory datasphere, his nineties novels—“Virtual Light,” “Idoru,” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties”—take place in a world that is itself fluid and hallucinatory. They are set in California and Tokyo in the two-thousands. The Big One has rendered San Francisco’s Bay Bridge unusable, and the government of Northern California—the state has split in two—can’t afford to fix it. Squatters, homeless after a pre-earthquake housing crisis, have used high- and low-tech materials—tarps, plywood, aircraft cable—to turn its decks and towers into a cool suspended shantytown. Media saturation has cloaked even the recent past in a haze; TV news programs practice “counter-investigative journalism,” reporting on the newsrooms to which they are ideologically opposed. Culture is globalized and high-def. Virtual celebrities are replacing real ones, and patrons in a bar called Cognitive Dissidents dance to the evangelical Islamic band Chrome Koran. Fashion is retrofitted: Chevette, a bike messenger, wears a vintage horsehide motorcycle jacket with bar codes affixed to its lapels. A woman’s scalp tattoo combines Celtic crosses with cartoon lightning bolts. A teen-ager puts his feet up, revealing “little red lights around the edges of his sneakers . . . spelling out the lyrics to some song.”
Futurists he knew had begun talking about “the Singularity”—the moment when humanity is transformed completely by technology. Gibson didn’t buy it; he aimed to represent a “half-assed Singularity”—a world transforming dramatically but haphazardly. “It doesn’t feel to me that it’s in our nature to do anything perfectly,” he said. He wrote improvisationally, without knowing how his novels would end. (In “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” an assassin who bears a striking physical resemblance to Gibson is guided in his actions by the Tao.) His fiction was an “artifact,” he told an interviewer, akin to tombstone rubbings—the tombstone, in this case, being our present. The trilogy culminates, obscurely, with the introduction of consumer nanotechnology through a chain of convenience stores. No one knows what to make of it; an atmosphere of WTF prevails. At one of these stores, a kid buys “this Jap candy that’s like a little drug lab”: “You mix these different parts, it fizzes, gets hot, cools. You do this extrusion-molding thing and watch it harden.” It tastes just O.K., but it’s fun. Meanwhile, in a room on the Bay Bridge—at the top of the east tower, above the fog—Chevette reads old issues of National Geographic and marvels at the size of the old countries, long since broken up.
When Gibson published his first short story in Omni, in 1981, the writer Robert Sheckley took him to lunch and gave him two pieces of advice: never sign a multi-book contract and don’t buy an old house. Gibson ignored the latter suggestion; on my second morning in Vancouver, a rainstorm descended, and he texted to say that he needed to check his attic for leaks, inviting my assistance. (“I have a fear of doing it alone,” he texted, lest “the ladder fall over.”)
“It’s coming down hard,” Gibson said, when I arrived. “Luckily, I’ve got the perfect jacket for you.” In writing “Virtual Light” and its sequels, he’d learned to harness his obsessions, among them garments and their semiotic histories.
In the hall, he relieved me of my misjudged chore coat, and handed me a recent reproduction of Eddie Bauer’s 1936 Skyliner down jacket: a forerunner of the down-filled B-9 flight suit, worn by aviators during the Second World War. Boxy and beige, its diamond-quilted nylon was rigid enough to stand up on its own. When I put it on, it made me about four inches wider. Gibson shrugged into a darkly futuristic tech-ninja shell by Acronym, the Berlin-based atelier, constructed from some liquidly matte material.
“You have to dress for the job,” he said.
We ventured into the verdant back yard, retrieving an eight-foot ladder from the garage. Carefully, we carried the ladder through the house and up a winding, skylit central staircase. Gibson’s height allowed him to casually open the attic door. I watched his rose-colored Chucks disappear into the hole. When I ascended, I found him lit by a small window, balancing gracefully on the joists, carrying a bucket heavy with water.
“Thank you very much,” he said, handing it to me.
As it happened, a closet in a room off the hallway contained Gibson’s Acronym collection. (He is friends with the co-founder and designer of Acronym, Errolson Hugh, and was briefly involved, as a consultant, in the creation of Arc’teryx Veilance, a futuristic, or perhaps merely presentist, outerwear line that Hugh helped design.) As a longtime Acronym lurker—I don’t own any, but would like to—I was curious to see the jackets, which enable excessive, even fantastic levels of functionality. “This is something Errolson calls the ‘escape zip,’ ” Gibson said, indicating an unusual zipper along the jacket’s shoulder, and demonstrating how it could be used to enact an instantaneous, overhanded dejacketing. Another coat, long and indefinably gray-green, was seductively sinister—the most cyberpunk object I’d seen in Gibson’s home. “This is this weird membrane that Gore-Tex makes,” he said, rubbing the fabric—leather-like on one side, synthetic on the other—between his fingers. “Errolson gave it to me when they hadn’t named it yet. I was trying to come up with a name. . . .”
“This is what I imagine the scary hit man wearing, in ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’ ” I said.
“Oh, the scary hit man, yeah!” Gibson said. “I’m delighted to have this jacket, but it’s hard to wear it. It’s almost too effective. It absorbs too much light.” He enjoys wearing the future, but fears full cosplay.
Satisfied, Gibson returned the jacket to the closet. Biggles watched from the landing as we carried the ladder and the bucket down the stairs. Techno-fabric and a leaky roof: the real future.
Was Gibson afraid of what the future held? Like anyone, he lived in the present, awaiting tomorrow. By the end of the nineties, he’d taken up Pilates and given up smoking. Claire lived nearby; so did Graeme, who has autism, and a savant-like ability to play hundreds of musical instruments. Gibson and Deborah had helped him build a secure life. (Gibson drops by every day, and often shares Graeme’s birding photographs on Twitter.)
He had reason to be concerned about a rising F.Q. But he managed to keep that concern contained within his writing life. “Bill’s always been able to shut the door in his head,” Jack Womack, one of Gibson’s oldest friends, said. Womack is also a Southerner—he’s from Lexington, Kentucky—and a science-fiction writer. For decades, Gibson has sent his drafts to Womack, who’s based in New York, every few days—at first by fax, and in later years by e-mail. “I’ve always perceived him as someone who takes everything in before making a decision,” Womack continued. “Not paranoid, not suspicious. Just a good poker player.” Writing near-future science fiction, Womack said, requires “detachment.” It’s like living during the Cold War with knowledge of the bomb.
And yet Gibson seemed, at the turn of the century, to be growing dissatisfied with being detached. When “All Tomorrow’s Parties” was finished, “I felt a little let down,” he said. “Not with how the book had turned out, but there was something about the experience. . . . It was beginning to seem as though I was doing something that belonged to a previous era.” He wondered if science fiction, as a genre, might be yellowing with age. He was certainly aging: at fifty, he’d begun cognitive-behavioral therapy, hoping to process the unconfronted experiences of his childhood. Meanwhile, he said, “things were different. The world outside the window was beginning to look considerably stranger to me than the ones I was imagining for my fictional futures.”
Unsure how to proceed, Gibson bided his time. He flew back and forth to London, working on a screenplay for “Neuromancer,” which had been optioned for a film. He spent time on eBay—the first Web site that felt to him like a real place, perhaps because it was full of other people and their junk. Through eBay, he discovered an online watch forum, and, through the forum, he developed some expertise in military watches. He learned of a warehouse in Egypt from which it was possible to procure extinct Omega components; he sourced, for the forum membership, a particular kind of watch strap, the G10, which had originally been manufactured in the nineteen-seventies and had since become obscure. (A version of it, known as the nato strap, is now wildly popular in menswear circles.) Gibson noticed that people with access to unlimited information could develop illusions of omniscience. He got into a few political debates on the forum. He felt the F.Q. creeping upward.
The advent of the online world, he thought, was changing the physical one. In the past, going online had felt like visiting somewhere else. Now being online was the default: it was our Here, while those awkward “no service” zones of disconnectivity had become our There. Checking his Vancouver bank balance from an A.T.M. in Los Angeles struck him suddenly as spooky. It didn’t matter where you were in the landscape; you were in the same place in the datascape. It was as though cyberspace were turning inside out, or “everting”—consuming the world that had once surrounded it.
In Japan, he had learned the word otaku, used to describe people with obsessive, laserlike interests. The Web, he saw, allowed everyone everywhere to develop the same otaku obsessions—with television, coffee, sneakers, guns. The mere possibility of such knowledge lay like a scrim over the world. A physical object was also a search term: an espresso wasn’t just an espresso; it was also Web pages about crema, fair trade, roasting techniques, varieties of beans. Things were texts; reality had been augmented. Brand strategists revised the knowledge around objects to make them more desirable, and companies, places, Presidents, wars, and people could be advantageously rebranded, as though the world itself could be reprogrammed. It seemed to Gibson that this constant reprogramming, which had become a major driver of economic life, was imbuing the present with a feeling—something like fatigue, or jet lag, or loss.
The suddenness with which the world’s code could be rewritten astonished him. “I was down in my basement office, on a watch site that I spent a lot of time on,” Gibson recalled. “Someone on the East Coast posted, ‘Plane hit World Trade Center.’ I Googled it—there was nothing. I went to get some coffee. And when I came back there was a second post under the first: ‘Second plane hit. It wasn’t an accident.’ ” The attack rewrote our expectations. It made life instantly scarier. It also seemed to adjust the temporality of the world. From then on, events would move faster. There would be no screen—only a locomotive.
“Pattern Recognition” and its sequels, “Spook Country” (2007) and “Zero History” (2010), are “set in a world that meets virtually every criteria of being science fiction, and that happens to be our world,” Gibson has said. “We have no future,” one character concludes. “Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did.” Such “fully imagined cultural futures” were possible only when “ ‘now’ was of some greater duration”:
For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient “now” to stand on. We have no futures because our present is too volatile. . . . We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.
In a hyperconnected world, patterns can repeat in different idioms. The same ripples flow across Asia and Europe, art and technology, war and television. Even terror-hunting and cool-hunting are related. In “Zero History,” fashion strategists tracking a reclusive designer of otaku denim stumble into a parallel world of clandestine arms deals. Secrets are “the very root of cool,” one character explains, and so today’s coolness flows from our modern secrets: rendition, black ops, Gitmo, Prism. There’s a reason musicians dress like soldiers. Art has become tactical. Culture and counterterror are mirror worlds.
“Bill worried about ‘Pattern Recognition,’ ” Womack told me. Gibson didn’t know how people would react to his sci-fi of the present. The novel’s protagonist, Cayce Pollard, isn’t a hacker but a brand strategist who’s been hired by a viral-marketing think tank for a commercial research project. She doesn’t zoom through glowing datascapes; instead, having suffered from “too much exposure to the reactor cores of fashion,” she practices a kind of semiotic hygiene, dressing only in “CPUs,” or “Cayce Pollard Units”—clothes, “either black, white, or gray,” that “could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000.” She treasures in particular a black MA-1 bomber jacket made by Buzz Rickson’s, a Japanese company that meticulously reproduces American military clothing of the mid-twentieth century. (All other bomber jackets—they are ubiquitous on city streets around the world—are remixes of the original.) The MA-1 is to “Pattern Recognition” what the cyberspace deck is to “Neuromancer”: it helps Cayce tunnel through the world, remaining a “design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.” Precisely because it’s a near-historical artifact—“fucking real, not fashion”—the jacket’s code can’t be rewritten. It’s the source code.
Gibson needn’t have worried about the novel; it spawned its own cult. Buzz Rickson’s is a real company, based in Tokyo. (It takes its name from a character played by Steve McQueen, who, in Japan, is a men’s fashion icon of special stature.) The company’s policy of military-historical accuracy prohibits it from making inauthentic garments; actual MA-1 flight jackets, produced for about twenty years, starting in the late nineteen-fifties, were sage green. And yet, after “Pattern Recognition” was published, customers began e-mailing Rickson’s in the hope of buying a black version. Making an exception, the company collaborated with Gibson on a black MA-1 that became, in some circles, instantly iconic. Made of a carefully re-created mid-century nylon, it is simultaneously antique and futuristic. There is now a range of “Buzz Rickson’s x William Gibson” military outerwear. Meanwhile, a decade after “Pattern Recognition,” K-HOLE, a marketing think tank modelled on the one in the novel, popularized Cayce’s fashion philosophy in the form of “normcore,” a trend—forecasted, then real—based on the idea of secretive, informed, intentional blankness. Normcore influenced design more broadly, shaping the aesthetics of companies like Everlane and Uniqlo. The boundary between fiction and reality turned out to be even blurrier than Gibson had thought. He had rewritten the code himself.
In earlier decades, Gibson had been lauded for imagining futuristic developments that seemed strangely plausible: a “fractal knife” with more edge than meets the eye; a “micro-bachelor” apartment built into a retrofitted parking garage in Santa Monica. Now the polarity has reversed itself. Today, on Twitter, Gibson’s followers share bits of the present that seem plausibly science-fictional. Protesters in Chile use laser pointers to bring down police drones. A stalker tracks a Japanese pop star to her apartment by extracting its reflected image from a photograph of her pupil. (Everyday life can be Gibsonian, too: a woman entering the subway in a tweed blazer and camo parachute pants; kids learning dances from Fortnite.) In “Agency,” a customer in an otaku coffee shop watches the silent news on someone else’s laptop. “If it wasn’t the hurricane hitting Houston,” she thinks, “the earthquake in Mexico, the other hurricane wrecking Puerto Rico, or the worst wildfires in California history, it was Qamishli.” The novel has yet to be published, but readers with advance copies have pointed out that the fighting in Qamishli, a city on the border between Turkey and Syria, is now real.
Inspired by Cayce Pollard, Emily Segal, one of the founders of K-HOLE, runs her own “alternative” branding and trend-forecasting consultancy, Nemesis, in Berlin. It’s easy, she said, to fall into the trap of thinking that novel things must be entirely new. Gibson, by contrast, is often “looking for something else—for things that aren’t especially new, but suddenly stand out as special.” A changing world might reveal itself not in the never-before-seen, but in the re-seen. “Once you get put in a position where people and corporations think you can predict the future, you see how much of a bullshit enterprise that is,” she went on. “But intuition is real, and texts and art works take on lives of their own, and sometimes it feels like technology does, too. It can seem like you’re seeing the future. Really, you’re just participating in history.”
In Vancouver, I met a friend for dinner. We found each other in Gastown, the city’s stylish old quarter, and walked east, in search of a restaurant she wanted to try. The walk seemed to go on and on. I scrutinized the street numbers and consulted my phone, where my blue dot drifted through the grid. I’d forgotten what Gibson had said about brutality, Canadian style, until someone pushed a shopping cart past me. We were there: across from the restaurant, a tent city huddled in the dusk.
Not long afterward, Gibson came to New York. We had coffee at a counter in Chelsea Market, near the logoed elevators leading to YouTube’s offices. Then we entered Artechouse, a high-tech exhibition space, to check out “Machine Hallucination,” a video installation by Refik Anadol, a Turkish artist. The installation was designed to conjure a sleek, data-saturated metropolis: computer-generated images pulsed and swam over the walls and floor of a large subterranean room, as though every surface were a screen. Instead of talking—it was impossible to converse over the synthesized soundtrack—people posted videos from their phones. In a sage-green MA-1 with black sleeves—an ahistorical, experimental make—and a wool baseball cap, Gibson leaned against a pillar, illuminated by vivid, geometric images evocative of the decades-old cyberspace of “Neuromancer.” Eventually, the images shifted: colorful layers of hand-size pixels suggested a Pointillist cyberspace for the neural-network age. Gibson smiled sympathetically: it was hard to invent visual metaphors for the digital world.
Leaving “Machine Hallucination” meant crossing a floor of radiant C.G.I. We shuffled vertiginously to one door, then another, then another, before finding the real exit and escaping to a lobby.
“Jesus Christ,” Gibson said, blinking. “Those cyberspace cowboys, they deal with that shit every day!”
Chelsea Market’s retro brands surrounded us—a cheesemonger, a hot-sauce emporium—each with its own distinctive design language. Neon, chrome, veneer; historical typography, the New York of the past. It was as if, having emerged from one William Gibson novel, we had entered another.
“Which way do we go?” Gibson asked.
“I think this way,” I said, indicating a purveyor of Australian meat pies.
“Make a wrong turn down here and you’ll be in the headquarters of YouTube,” Gibson mused. “You’ll never get out. Never! You think Facebook is bad? Those YouTube motherfuckers—they will really fuck you up.”
We took a cab to dinner at Lucky Strike, a French bistro in SoHo that Gibson enjoys. In the back seat, sitting next to him, I thought of the surprising tenderness in his recent novels: in “Agency,” a man works from home while taking care of his baby, as Gibson once did. (Unlike Gibson, he uses a telepresence headset.) It used to be, Gibson had told me, that a defensive membrane divided his life from his work. He could consider the future as a professional, without picturing his own life, his kids’ lives. “I never wanted to be the guy thinking about ‘Mad Max’ world,” he said. “I had some sort of defense in place. . . . It’s denial, some kind of denial. But denial can be a lifesaving thing, in certain lives, in certain times. How on earth did you get through that? Some reliable part of you just says, It’s not happening.” The membrane, he went on, “which I very, very much miss, actually held until the morning after Trump’s election. And I woke up and it was gone, whatever it was. It was just gone, and it’s never come back.”
At dinner, Jack Womack joined us. The restaurant was loud and dimly lit, its tables and chairs artfully cheap, the specials written on mirrors in white pen. Attractive drinkers, dressed in black, raised coupe glasses. At our corner table, conversation turned to the jackpot.
“What I find most unsettling,” Gibson said, “is that the few times that I’ve tried to imagine what the mood is going to be, I can’t. Even if we have total, magical good luck, and Brexit and Trump and the rest turn out as well as they possibly can, the climate will still be happening. And as its intensity and steadiness are demonstrated, and further demonstrated—I try to imagine the mood, and my mind freezes up. It’s a really grim feeling.” He paused. “I’ve been trying to come to terms with it, personally. And I’ve started to think that maybe I won’t be able to.”
Womack nodded. “My daughter’s sixteen and a half,” he said. “Sixty years from now, she’ll be in her mid-seventies. I have absolutely no idea what the physical world will be like then. What the changes will be.”
“It’s totally new,” Gibson said. “A genuinely new thing.” He looked away from us, into the room. Another song came on the sound system. Incandescent light gilded the mirrors. A young woman in round glasses leaned back in her chair. I felt, suddenly, that we were all living in the past. ♦
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